The single most powerful lever in British economic policy is not a tax rate or an interest rate. It is the pension default. Change what happens to the money of the person who never fills in the form, and you change where a large part of the nation's savings ends up. We proved this once already, with automatic enrolment, and we can prove it again.
Automatic enrolment worked because of a simple insight about human behaviour. When saving into a pension required people to opt in, most did not. When the rule flipped, so that people were enrolled by default and had to tick a box to opt out, participation rose dramatically. Nobody was forced. The default did the work, because the truth is that the overwhelming majority of us never touch the default at all.
The lesson we have not finished learning
Here is the part we have left undone. That vast pool of default pension money is still overwhelmingly invested away from British growth. More than nine in ten savers sit in the default fund, and that fund rarely holds much in the way of UK scale-ups, infrastructure or regional projects. So the country's own future gets almost none of the country's own long-term savings. This is not a failure of the savers. It is a failure of default design.
Soft compulsion fixes it without forcing anyone. The mechanism is the same as auto-enrolment, one step further on. The default fund includes a stated, transparent share, say a tenth, invested in growth initiatives across the United Kingdom. If you want that, you do nothing and it happens for you. If you do not want it, you tick a box and opt out, precisely as you could when you were first enrolled. Freedom is preserved. Inertia is put to work for Britain instead of against it.
It has already started
This is not a thought experiment. In May 2025 seventeen of the largest workplace pension providers signed the Mansion House Accord, agreeing to invest at least 10 per cent of their defined contribution default funds in private markets by 2030, with half of that in the United Kingdom. Around 252 billion pounds of savings falls within scope. That is soft compulsion arriving through the front door, even if it remains voluntary for now.
The honest debate is about what happens if the pledge stalls. The government has kept reserve powers to require allocations if providers do not deliver. I would rather it never came to mandation, because forced allocation invites bad investment made to hit a target. The better path is a clear default that savers can see and choose to leave, backed by the discipline that this is their money and it must earn them a return.
Why a centre-right voice should back this
Some on the right will hear compulsion and reach for the off switch. They should look closer. This is not the state seizing savings. It is the state fixing a default that currently sends British savings abroad by accident, while leaving every individual free to choose otherwise. It builds ownership, not dependency. The saver ends up with a stake in the country's growth, and the growth ends up funded by patient domestic money rather than by borrowing.
We have the machine. Automatic enrolment showed it works. The only question left is whether we are willing to aim it at Britain. Soft compulsion is how you do that while still trusting people to make their own choice, which is exactly the balance good policy should strike.